[WIP] Selaco - a brand new standalone shooter running on GZDoom

Decided to give it a quick spin after purchase and... those 4 hours went by real quick!

I feel that it's still got a couple of niggles that I posted about the demo way back in 2022, particularly about there not being very much in the way of pain indicators. You do get a directional marker telling you where you're being pinged from, but to mine there's just too subtle of an on-screen flash or vocalisation from Dawn before your average firefight with lower-tier goons has seen 60hp shaved off your health. That's compounded by the sheer amount of muzzle flash, smoke and visual noise sometimes making it difficult to tell when you're landing your shots. And on top it off, enemies are extremely fluid, constantly darting this way and that; plus they flank you relentlessly, and practically every room has multiple entry points, so you'll find yourself outmaneuvered and shredded real quickly.

But those are also the game's greatest strengths. Enemies feel intelligent. They'll use their numbers to overwhelm you and force you to create chokepoints so you'll have less angles to be hit from. They'll make you use your relatively slow speed in conjunction with your dash, melee and guns to create your own setpieces where you pick them off one by one: dashing down a corridor with a slidekick into some mook's hindquarters, leaping up and punching his buddy's teeth into next Tuesday before unloading your shotgun into the first one's stomach after he's picked himself up - and all this just around a corner so his goons that were meant to be laying down suppressing fire don't quite have line-of-sight on you. Fuck it up and you get carved into pieces, but nail it and it's a goddamned ballet.

I could probably spend some time bitching about how the levels are sprawling (personal pet peeve) and often just use a simple "go towards green light" mechanic rather than any really distinct architecture or set dressing. Or complain about how the second level's Zelda crack bombing and crate shifting tutorial seriously throws the brakes on the pacing (which was unrelenting up until that point).

But I'm not gonna.

I'm gonna get back to practicing gunkata combos and throw the game into lower difficulty, see if that makes it less stingy with the shotgun ammo so I can liquefy more Slurm-filled Combine motherfuckers.

@SelacoDev, will Selaco eventually come to GOG as well?  I know I'm not the only one who wants to know.

Congrats on the release. Gotta be honest, back then when I played the vertical slice you guys had for the demo it was so vertical and so slice I had every doubt it was ever going to release. Glad to see the game is mostly here

On 6/1/2024 at 12:25 AM, Daytime Waitress said:

Decided to give it a quick spin after purchase and... those 4 hours went by real quick!

 

I feel that it's still got a couple of niggles that I posted about the demo way back in 2022, particularly about there not being very much in the way of pain indicators. You do get a directional marker telling you where you're being pinged from, but to mine there's just too subtle of an on-screen flash or vocalisation from Dawn before your average firefight with lower-tier goons has seen 60hp shaved off your health. That's compounded by the sheer amount of muzzle flash, smoke and visual noise sometimes making it difficult to tell when you're landing your shots. And on top it off, enemies are extremely fluid, constantly darting this way and that; plus they flank you relentlessly, and practically every room has multiple entry points, so you'll find yourself outmaneuvered and shredded real quickly.

 

But those are also the game's greatest strengths. Enemies feel intelligent. They'll use their numbers to overwhelm you and force you to create chokepoints so you'll have less angles to be hit from. They'll make you use your relatively slow speed in conjunction with your dash, melee and guns to create your own setpieces where you pick them off one by one: dashing down a corridor with a slidekick into some mook's hindquarters, leaping up and punching his buddy's teeth into next Tuesday before unloading your shotgun into the first one's stomach after he's picked himself up - and all this just around a corner so his goons that were meant to be laying down suppressing fire don't quite have line-of-sight on you. Fuck it up and you get carved into pieces, but nail it and it's a goddamned ballet.

 

I could probably spend some time bitching about how the levels are sprawling (personal pet peeve) and often just use a simple "go towards green light" mechanic rather than any really distinct architecture or set dressing. Or complain about how the second level's Zelda crack bombing and crate shifting tutorial seriously throws the brakes on the pacing (which was unrelenting up until that point).

 

But I'm not gonna.

 

I'm gonna get back to practicing gunkata combos and throw the game into lower difficulty, see if that makes it less stingy with the shotgun ammo so I can liquefy more Slurm-filled Combine motherfuckers.

Agree with a lot of what is being said here. The visual noise can be a little unrelenting, but for whatever reason my brain decided that it was part of the difficulty and I adjusted my play style to work around it (not entirely sure it is intended to be that way). I do however find the pathfinding to be fine especially with the map markers.

Gonna second the visual indicators for pain. Especially on higher difficulties where one shot can really make a difference.

If I had one thing that I could truly complain about is: why no sprint? F.E.A.R has a sprint and it saves lives.

10 hours ago, TheFartKing said:

Agree with a lot of what is being said here. The visual noise can be a little unrelenting, but for whatever reason my brain decided that it was part of the difficulty and I adjusted my play style to work around it (not entirely sure it is intended to be that way).

I found that sliding the muzzle flash and smoke "quality" (intensity) down to medium made a bit of an improvement on my end. You're still gonna catch hot ones through a mess of fire extinguisher jizz if someone dings it during a firefight, but the wait is going to be a little less tedious.

And I wouldn't stress about the "intended way": this really does seem like the kind of shooter where any single player can take radically different approaches to a single combat instance, and that's only gonna multiply across multiple players. A huge tick in the game's plus column.

10 hours ago, TheFartKing said:

I do however find the pathfinding to be fine especially with the map markers.

It's at once sleek and modern, and at the same time comfortably familiar (seeing those purplepink secret sectors in a commercial title makes my heart skip). They really seemed to take note of what folks like Sandwedge said last page, with a clear delineation between "architecture" and "other bullshit that's going to trip you up".

10 hours ago, TheFartKing said:

Gonna second the visual indicators for pain. Especially on higher difficulties where one shot can really make a difference.

At first I thought it was just me being nitpicky, but then I set Dawn on fire.

I picked up a plastic chair and brushed past a flaming barrel, and all of a sudden my health is tanking and there are a bunch of particle effects on screen that are definitely not going to get lost in a firefight, but Jane Q Selaco here has just given me an "unf" indistinguishable from her wallhump.wav before proceeding to bleed the heck out.

Turns out if you stand in a fire, you get a Vault Boy-styled cooldown icon (same timer as your slide) and the life-loss is more noticeable, but Dawn is still all "yawn".

I appreciate that she's not dropping Shelly-style one-liners every time she caps an enemy but, girl, give me some Stephan Weyte-tier H A M when you're being roasted alive, yeah?

Sound design in the game is generally top-tier: tonnes of ambient noise and it's genuinely thrilling to catch the footsteps of an approaching enemy to try and get a read on which direction they're approaching from. So it's a bit confusing when enemy hit registers, enemy deaths and player hit registers are less directly communicated than a certain other title from 30 years ago that also runs on GZDoom... *bonerattle.wav* okay, the agitated skeleton is down, I can direct my attention to that gaggle of imps now. Legit open question, not just directed at you, TheFartKing: is that an unreasonable expectation I'm making?

10 hours ago, TheFartKing said:

If I had one thing that I could truly complain about is: why no sprint? F.E.A.R has a sprint and it saves lives.

I've been real ambivalent about the level design up until now.

Part of that is personal burnout on the same office-boiler room-laboratory environs we've been seeing since forever.

Part of that is how densely-packed and lived-in and not "like a vidya gaem approximation of a real place but an actual real lived-in place" feel the combat arenas have going on.

Part of that is how I've come to appreciate how so much of what I've played so far takes place in just a single city block - shit's dense, y0.

But the game threatened to lose me when it opened up on the streets, because there are just hectares of walking to be done, with bugger-all to interact with.

You know there's going to be no combat, because the combat is the piece de resistance and has had the most attention and time and detail lavished on its environs and the combat fundamentally doesn't work without cover.

And I know it's there to add a sense of scale to proceedings, and people would probably be bitching if the playable area was smaller and filled with invisible walls.

But I feel like there's a middle ground, where set dressing (that the devs have demonstrated they're very, very good at) can convey a sense of openness without making you trudge around with Old Lady Dawn's zimmer frame. Did she start the game in the hospital room because both her legs were replaced with mini vending machines? Clank clank clank. Fucking robot woman - I'm genuinely loving your game, but I shouldn't have to dive into the options to double-check if auto-run is set to off.

Since I'm back to bitching, I really dislike the progression system, too. It made me realise why Dusk clicked so well with me, and why it's an actual retro-boomer-throwback-whateverthefuckSteamtag compared to practically everything else since: you get a new gun to play with every couple of levels. It caps out pretty early, but it doesn't gate weapons behind unlocks. And doesn't gate the unlocks behind currency that has to be sniffed out. I don't want to collect fifty woozle wuzzles per stage, just give me a damn super nailgun if I've lived for five stages.

I'm probably very alone in this sentiment.

I'm definitely very old.

@SelacoDev, take whatever is constructive from this lone rambling internet miscreant's screed. You're doing so damn well with the firefights, I just wish everything was a bit more streamlined.

Is there a ballpark of how long the EA campaign is? I'm normally a "wait until official release" kind of guy with EA but I'm just looking for any excuse to pick this one up anyway. Just wondering is it like...4 hours or 14 hours or what?

I’m 3 or 4 hours in and I’ve been doing as much secret hunting as I can. I imagine one could blaze through it but in higher difficulties the ammo, armor, and health is scarcer so it definitely extends the play time. 

I've done some asking around about the EA content. It looks like the full game will be three chapters, and the EA build is just chapter 1. However, I'm told that chapter 1 is basically the "main" campaign and the other two chapters will be more like expansions, and chapter 1 by itself has 30 maps in it. So you can expect it to be something like a full game's worth of content. There's obviously not much data on howlongtobeat.com yet, but someone seems to be saying it's 15 hours for a "Main + Extras" playthrough.

Nearly to the end of the campaign, but I'm enjoying it enough that I can see myself going back and picking up the secrets in either this run or a second at a higher difficulty.

The slow walking speed didn't annoy me as much as I'd expected when combat space opened up in the mall - enemy entry points and waves were positioned well enough to keep game's signature balance between cover, movement and enemy intensity; and I think I appreciated that brief interlude of larger arenas when combat bunched back up into more offices and labs in the next area.

And I even feel like the upgrades are less of a chore now, mainly because the nail gun's turret option finally gave me an excuse to use it. Had criminally low ammo on the initial spin, but it acts as a good early warning system and introduced a lot more fun tactical options for dealing with groups flanking you.

Still not keen on the crate shifting puzzles, though - they feel like they're from a completely different game. The environments are exquisitely detailed and enemies have obviously had a lot of work put into their behaviour; and then level progression gets gated by "awkwardly move barrels next to ledges or onto pressure plates". One of the extended wave-based arenas even has you essentially doing an escort mission for a (mercifully non-destructible) barrel. There's a bit of a nudge and a wink to help the player swallow that pill, but compare that to the spot towards the start of the game where you're shown an MRI machine. Of course your first instinct is to look for something metallic to throw into it and see what happens. There's a giant post-it note on the power switch warning against such shenanigans, but you still have to look about for a chair or whatever to huck in there before setting off the fireworks and getting rewarded with a secret room. Signposted, but it feels organic, and makes the observant player feel smart. But then in the next level, explodable walls are just dolled-up with yellow paint; and later levels feature quite a few of the abovementioned barrels. Starts to feel less engaging, less part of a believable universe, and to be honest like the absolute bare minimum in terms of level design.

I did end up picking this up and don't regret my decision so far. It does seem like quite a large game for a shooter, and by and large I'm liking the gameplay a lot. What I really like is how critical maintaining good positioning and anticipating and then moving well before you get overwhelemed is so important to staying alive in combat.

I do think hit feedback could be WAY better - all I tend to know during combat is that if I'm under fire I can expect to take somewhere between 5 and 5000 damage and it's kind of hard to know how badly I'm getting lit up until either I just have a second to glance down at my health or of course until I die. I also do personally struggle with the number of secrets and how almost...overwhelming it can be to enter an area and see there's now 12 secrets on top of the 9 you managed to overlook in the previous area and for me gameplay kind of grinds to a halt even though I generally like secret hunting. At least the multifunction meter exists or I'd have serious FOMO that would be hard to reconcile.

20 hours ago, LVENdead said:

I did end up picking this up and don't regret my decision so far. It does seem like quite a large game for a shooter...

 

I also do personally struggle with the number of secrets and how almost...overwhelming it can be to enter an area and see there's now 12 secrets on top of the 9 you managed to overlook in the previous area and for me gameplay kind of grinds to a halt even though I generally like secret hunting. At least the multifunction meter exists or I'd have serious FOMO that would be hard to reconcile.

Despite the slow walking speed, I've been really happy with how quick the world actually feels to traverse when zipping across all completed maps with the transit system. I picked apart the kind-of-samey-environments earlier, but the layouts do "stick" well, and feel solidly navigable when you're sliding/bunnyhopping through to pick up the last few whatevers.

I reconciled myself to coming back and clearing up secrets after the fact, because I found rooting them out during a blind run with enemies on my tits way too tedious. I think it was a good decision, because I enjoyed taking my time when hunting for some of the more obscure ones, and especially doing the larger, puzzle-styled types that seem to be one per level. They also never felt critical to getting the most out of it - the game seemed to chuck enough ammo/health in your path (I played on Lieutenant) - and even the prospect of finding upgrades felt encouraging. Felt like the exact opposite of the horseshit that Ion Fury pulled with its secrets - "You scaled a flaming, pixel-wide ledge across the length of a building? Have +2 armour!".

20 hours ago, LVENdead said:

What I really like is how critical maintaining good positioning and anticipating and then moving well before you get overwhelemed is so important to staying alive in combat.

 

I do think hit feedback could be WAY better - all I tend to know during combat is that if I'm under fire I can expect to take somewhere between 5 and 5000 damage and it's kind of hard to know how badly I'm getting lit up until either I just have a second to glance down at my health or of course until I die.

Final battle of chapter one really highlights both of those points. You're given enough prep time and cover to stack the environment in your favour, but holy hell if you get caught on a suitcase while rounding a corner, you are getting lit tf up.  The last wave especially drives the walking speed home, though...

And Civvie weighs in: